Cancer treatment will be dramatically transformed in the near future as a number of research projects reach fruition, Britain's leading cancer scientist will announce this week.

Sir David Lane, chief scientist at Cancer Research UK, will reveal on Wednesday that teams are closing in on techniques that are likely to lead to the creation of a new generation of drugs to combat major cancers. "The next few years are going to be very exciting," he said. "It would be wrong to raise hopes for patients in the very short term, but it would be unimaginable if we did not turn this work into something immensely useful in 10 to 20 years."

Lane will be the keynote speaker at a London conference organised by the National Cancer Research Institute to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the discovery of a human protein called p53, shown to play a pivotal role in the spread of nearly all cancers. "I was only a junior scientist at the time. It was clear p53 was important. However, none of us had any idea that it would turn out to be vital to understanding cancer. It is almost a universal factor we now realise."

Cancers arise because DNA errors build up inside the body's cells. It is the role of p53 to correct those errors and prevent cancerous mutations from spreading. Hence its nickname, the "guardian of the genome". It organises repairs to damaged cells and, in those beyond repair, it arranges for the cell to be killed off before it can spread and divide.

However, sometimes p53 becomes damaged and cannot do its job. As a result, damaged cells are able to form a tumour. "In this sense, you can think of cancers as the living dead: they are made up of cells that should have been killed off but which somehow have not and which pass through the body with deadly consequences," said Lane.

The crucial point about the discovery of p53's almost universal role in the formation of nearly all of the 200 types of cancer that affect humans is that it has raised immediate prospects of developing treatments for a wide range of tumours. Hence the excitement among cancer experts and the number of scientific studies now focused on the protein. These studies led last year to the publication of an average of 10 scientific reports on p53 every day.

Many of these studies are already producing results, as Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, will tell the conference. "We are starting to use our understanding of p53 to select treatment. For example, we know that in chronic lymphatic leukaemia conventional chemotherapy does not work well because cells continue to divide despite being damaged [by chemotherapy]."

What was now needed, Lane told the Observer, was to develop a drug that could pinpoint a cell with no p53 in it or possessed a mutated form of p53. It could then destroy that cell before it could spread and cause cancer. "That is the ultimate goal. We have a way to go, but we are confident. The last few years have been immensely encouraging."